It has been a common practice of many years to secure the soft cover telephone directories placed at public telephone facilities in hard cover binders in order to protect the directories against wear, weather, etc. The binders in turn were chained or otherwise secured to the facilities in order to prevent accidental removal or theft. None of the known security devices has proved to be tamper-proof. Telephone companies report annual losses of telephone directories from public telephone facilities in the thousands --adding a substantial cost factor to telephone operations in the replacement of directories and their binders.